Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”

— Matt Haig

352. “She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.”

— Matt Haig

353. “To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That’s the first elf rule. You can’t see something you don’t believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for.”

— Matt Haig

354. “Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

— Matt Haig

355. “When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. “Everybody dies,” wrote Nora Ephron.” There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.”

— Matt Haig

356. “I’ve never had a coconut chilli Martini before,′ I tell him. ‘That’s the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, still the optimist. ‘I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It’s the mana, you see. It’s everywhere. It’s never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.”

— Matt Haig

357. “The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.”

— Matt Haig

358. “What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.”

— Matt Haig

359. “Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.”

— Matt Haig

360. “A kiss,′ she said, ’is like music. It stops time...”

— Matt Haig

361. “If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”

— Matt Haig

362. “He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things “one day at a time,” as if there were another way for days to be experienced.”

— Matt Haig

363. “On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.”

— Matt Haig

364. “No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.”

— Matt Haig

365. “So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn’t stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he’d try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.”

— Matt Haig

366. “Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.”

— Matt Haig

367. “An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”

— Matt Haig

368. “The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called “The World.” No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds.”

— Matt Haig

369. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.”

— Matt Haig

370. “Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.”

— Matt Haig

371. “Kindness is a boomerang. You throw it out and you get it back. You had done kind things in the world, and you had been rewarded with kindness in return.”

— Matt Haig

372. “No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.”

— Matt Haig

373. “That kind of monotony that running generates – the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements – became a kind of metaphor for depression.”

— Matt Haig

374. “Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

— Matt Haig

375. “The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise.”

— Matt Haig

376. “I think life always provides reasons to not die, if we listen hard enough. Those reasons can stem from the past – the people who raised us, maybe, or friends or lovers – or from the future – the possibilities we would be switching off.”

— Matt Haig

377. “Let’s just understand this. If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.”

— Matt Haig

378. “Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.”

— Matt Haig

379. “Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and Short. Paragraphs. Light was everything. But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.”

— Matt Haig

380. “I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.”

— Matt Haig

381. “The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don’t know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.”

— Matt Haig

382. “There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

— Matt Haig

383. “When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.”

— Matt Haig

384. “Never say ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘cheer up’ unless you’re also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions.”

— Matt Haig

385. “It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind.”

— Matt Haig

386. “I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.”

— Matt Haig

387. “If you’re feeling bad about yourself, stay away from Instagram.”

— Matt Haig

388. “To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.”

— Matt Haig

389. “Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know.”

— Matt Haig

390. “I was scared. I couldn’t not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.”

— Matt Haig

391. “So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

392. “We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.”

— Matt Haig

393. “When things are taken from us, the stuff that remains has more value.”

— Matt Haig

394. “Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.”

— Matt Haig

395. “Mornings were hard on Earth. You woke up tireder than when you went to sleep. Your back ached. Your neck ached. Your chest felt tight with anxiety that came from being mortal. And then, on top of all that, you had to do so much before the day even started. The main problem was the stuff to do in order to be presentable.”

— Matt Haig

396. “The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.”

— Matt Haig

397. “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. – CARL SAGAN.”

— Matt Haig

398. “Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ’on the other side of despair.”

— Matt Haig

399. “Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.”

— Matt Haig

400. “But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels.”

— Matt Haig